28 October 2018 1:49 AM

The burglars are at your door. And the police? Hiding in their office: How the balance of fear is shifting in Britain as criminals are no loner afraid of the law

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column

Britain today is like a ship, long ago holed deep beneath the waterline, which now begins to list alarmingly, as the sea starts to slop on to the deck.

In many parts of this country, the balance of fear is shifting. Criminals are not afraid of the police and the courts. Normal people are afraid of wrongdoers.

How long before this happens where you live?

And then, what use will your easily broken windows and easily kicked-in front door be, or your burglar alarms to which nobody will respond?

In London, where the horror of knife crime is now plainly out of control, police are failing hopelessly in their efforts to catch and prosecute the culprits, even where there are living witnesses who could identify the men who tried to kill them. But they dare not do so.

As Sarah Jones, a Labour MP who heads Parliament’s all-party group on knife crime, says: ‘What’s particularly shocking is the growing number of offences where the police identified a suspect but they weren’t prosecuted because the victim did not support further action. This suggests a serious problem with victims feeling too afraid or mistrustful to testify.’

I would guess that this goes a lot further.

Many of us who have had dealings of one kind or another with the modern police suspect that, if we go to them, they will probably manage to mess up the case, ably assisted by the CPS, while also giving our full personal details to the suspect.

Even if they get it right, the criminal will be ‘spared jail’ by a feeble judge. Simpler to let it go.

And so the figures of recorded crime have a very distant relationship to actual crime. If there’s no insurance to be claimed, why bother?

Most of us reluctantly recognise that things which were once restrained by the law – general low-level nastiness, vandalism, public drunkenness, illegal drugs – have now been decriminalised by stealth.

The problem is that almost nobody in politics, or the media, or the police, is remotely interested in why this has happened or how to put it right.

The police themselves are like BT, or one of the other monster monopolies, which view the public as a nuisance.

The Police Federation is just another public service union, whose solution to everything is more taxpayers’ cash. But a lingering sentimentality stops us seeing this.

We used to like and respect the police, and we wish we still did, so we are more easily fooled by them than by any other lobby.

Take the current moaning about how their almost complete failure to enforce the laws against burglary, drunk driving, and drug possession is caused by a shortage of officers.

This is not true.

Police strengths are down a bit from their 2009 peak (was that an especially crime-free year?) but are significantly higher than they were in the days when all forces managed to patrol the streets.

The problem is that the police are doing the wrong thing.

Think about it. Please. What use is a police officer after a crime has been committed, unless he or she can do first aid?

If your life has been ruined by a drunken driver, or a motorist texting while driving, he cannot unruin that life. He cannot restore the irrevocably lost mental health of the teen who has smoked marijuana.

The best he can do is, with a lot of luck, arrange for the criminals involved to do a bit of community service, or be sentenced to a fine they won’t actually pay.

His job was to prevent these things from happening, by being a visible, patrolling presence in every town and village.

But he has stopped doing this.

The beats he used to walk long ago vanished. The police stations, hundreds of them, were sold off. So were the police houses. The police road patrols became a rarity.

The modern police deride these simple, effective methods. They claim they cannot halt cybercrime or terrorism or domestic abuse.

Well, this would be a good argument if the modern police methods of hiding in remote office blocks or driving about chatting to each other, worked any better.

But they do not.

I am astonished that the debate on this subject continues at this ignorant, partisan level.

It is as if the captain and his first lieutenant were arguing, on the bridge, about the menu for dinner, while the ship went down by the bows.

Corbynites may love the new film Peterloo, about the indefensible massacre, in 1819, of unarmed Englishmen and women by drunken, stupid soldiers under the command of dolts.

If Left-wing speeches are your thing, there is no shortage of them in this drama, which seemed to me to last slightly longer than the Hundred Years War.

The final scenes of slaughter are, by contrast, powerfully moving.

But the whole point of Peterloo is that it was the middle classes who publicised it, using that great invention, the newspaper, and denounced it, and sought the reforms which ensured that the voice of the people would be heard and heeded in the land, without bloodshed.

I feel great sympathy for the old soldiers now being dragged from their retirement by officious detectives to face investigations about long ago events in Northern Ireland.

Soldiers are owed the total loyalty of the Crown, which sent them into danger and demanded their disciplined obedience.

But I feel no sympathy with most of the soppy politicians now raising their cases and bleating about how unfair it all is.

For these politicians continue to pretend that our abject crawling to IRA gangsters (and ‘Loyalist’ gangsters, too) in Belfast in 1998 was a benevolent, happy peace deal.

It was not. It was a capitulation.

Which is why it is we who withdrew our forces, and we who hauled down our flags and ceded our territory (it will pass to Dublin’s control quite soon).

Our lawless enemies kept their guns and bombs, rose to power, and dined at Windsor Castle.

And it is our soldiers who face police inquiries, while hundreds of grisly terrorists were released from well-earned prison sentences, and hundreds more promised that their bloody crimes are forgotten.

How strange it is that a country which admires Churchill’s defiance of a wicked and mighty enemy applauds our surrender to a small, criminal gang.

Unlike those who rushed to conclusions about alleged gas attacks in Syria, without bothering with evidence, I have waited till it is beyond reasonable doubt that the Saudi regime murdered the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, on their own premises, using their own state- paid hoodlums.

And now I can say this to our Government, and to the warlike media voices and MPs of all parties who have postured over the undoubted wickedness of Russia and Syria: You are hypocrites. Your moralising is all phoney.

Because, as we will see in the years to come, the many barbarities of the Saudi regime will not lead to sanctions, or bombing raids or missiles or mass expulsions of diplomats.

Nor will the increasingly obvious aggression and despotism of our other great friends, the Chinese.

These killers and tyrants will still be welcome at Buckingham Palace. And this does not really bother you.

So it is obvious that we, as a country, can be bought, and actually have no morals.

And so either your outrage against Syria and Russia is a pose to make you look better than you are; or you do not know what you are talking about; or you have other, less creditable reasons for seeking conflict with these countries.

That is now established.

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'Short Breaks in Mordor' A collection of my reports from places you need to know about but probably don't want to visit - E.g. Pyongyang, Baghdad, Minsk, Teheran, Cairo, Katanga, Mandalay, Deoband, Peshawar, Baku and Tashkent - is now available as a paperback here

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On Saudi Arabia, our culpability is somewhat greater than you say. We are actively helping the Saudis prosecute their war on Yemen. The help is not merely diplomatic. Our armed forces are helping the Saudi air force which is deliberately targeting the production, storage, and distribution of food with the intention of starving the population into submission. As well as the fifty thousand and rising killed in the fighting, there are millions starving and exposed to cholera. The Saudis could not proceed with this slaughter if the UK and US did not join in.

When watching British Police programmes on the TV, I actually cringe at some of the footage and have to switch channels.
Who is interested in hearing a policeman's nickname, or that his favourite food is a mars bar, or the fact that he likes to drive a 'Beamer'....surely, whoever is supposed to be in charge of the Police, would not allow such drivel to be aired in the first place, as it is wholly embarrasing to watch and shows just how low our law and laws have sunk.
It is no wonder that today's thugs and criminals laugh out loud at the Police.
I despair that things will never change, while these despicable so called PC politicians and in particular Mrs May, are in charge.
Thank goodness I am old!

When I saw the headline that included the phrase “criminals are no longer afraid of the law”, I was expecting to read, as well as criticisms of the police because they are referred to in the headline, some comments on soft sentencing, prosecutions gone wrong on technicalities or for bureaucratic reasons or even examples of the reluctance of the CPS to prosecute criminal behaviour. I say this because the phrase ‘the law’, includes not just the police but other institutions – the courts, judiciary, the CPS all too which uphold it.
However, in the short article that followed, the words court, CPS and judge all appeared once each, with barely a mention of their role in upholding the law, whereas the word ‘police’ occurred 15 times, each time with a critical remark on the way they go about their business. The article was clearly more concentrated on the police role in tackling crime and upholding the law than any other institution that upholds the law. I glanced at the index at the side of your page to see whether the words courts, CPS, judge, or judiciary appeared, hoping that you might have written as critically about them as you have the police but found no mention of those words. I can’t imagine that you have not criticised them in your columns, but you seem to, in my opinion, spend most of your columns on crime and ‘the law’ as your headline puts it, singling out the police above the other institutions that uphold the law. Is there a reason for this?

The practice of making "Politically Correct" "Common Purpose trained"appointments to the top of Police Forces, of which Cressida Dick is the tip of the iceberg, has steadily taken it's toll. That a senior office in the Met can be suspended for using the term "whiter than white" says it all.

Dare I say too that when you import the populations of other parts of the world en masse to the UK, you also import the problems with lawlessness that exist in many of those countries. Turning a blind eye to that will not mean the problem goes away.

We recently got burgled during the night. Fortunately the crooks didn't venture upstairs where we were sleeping. After a visit from the police, they left me with a mobile number, which I called and left a message asking for a crime number for the insurance company, but never heard a word back. Too busy I suppose.

Peter, your acknowledgement that the Northern Irish terror gangs on both sides of the sectarian divide in the conflict which ended in 1998 were of equal culpability is welcome, however I respectfully challenge your assertions regarding the behaviour of the British Army, especially in the early part of that conflict.

I recently viewed a documentary shown on Channel 4 entitled "Massacre at Ballymurphy". I would strongly urge you to view this. It is difficult not to have some sympathy for the people whose lives were affected by this incident from 1971.

And I do think that it is important that the British Army (as a very powerful arm of the state) learn from this incident if necessary. The army (like the police) serves to protect law abiding people, not oppress, control and - as is alleged in this case - murder them.

I await entertainment from a multitude of academics. We will soon be hearing how this was always a lawless, violent society; how people once carried swords and how they would have at each other in the street. This will probably be accompanied by earnest documentaries on the television... reminding us that times of such lawlessness invariably coincided with great cultural achievements. I admit myself a trifle baffled as to where they are going to find any evidence of any cultural achievement... but... you never can tell.

It is cause for concern when friends attempting to serve in what was once a police force tell you... with well earned weariness... that we now live in a feral society. I glance over my shoulder and see that there were those of us predicting this descent some several decades ago. The cause for such predictions would be a bit "progressive" legislation and/or some "good to go" and well publicised management initiative. In the background, we have a situation wherein the balance of wealth and power have most definiteley shifted into the hands of those who have no idea how it might be used constructively... or for the benefit of anything except their own inflated egos.

But don't despair. Such awesome progress is being made that the vast majority of people do not even notice. This is very reassuring insofar as... if they don't notice, they won't discover that they're not allowed to discuss causes... or think about them.

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